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As Olivier Roy observes, the secularisation of European Christianity is reflected in a culturalization of Christian references. Freed from their religious significance, these symbols become cultural heritage markers and can be the object of political instrumentalization. As such, “Christian roots” have become a topical feature of populist discourses whether in France, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Bavaria or elsewhere. Became a heritage as a cultural matrix, Christianity makes it possible to compete with the people's identification to the citizens by constructing a “real” people identifiable with its culture. Muslims or sexual minorities are symbolically excluded from the civic body and their demands disqualified as deviances. This rhetoric would be an indicator of a trend towards illiberalism on a global scale. But the secularisation paradigm has its limits. For how can we explain the success of populist leaders in geographical areas that are much less secularised than Europe, such as Brazil and the United States ? There are indeed deep affinities between populist rhetoric and certain political theologies.

Keywords: sécularisation, instrumentalisation politique, recomposition partisane, illibéralisme, théologies politiques, secularization, political instrumentalization, parties' reconfiguration, illiberalism, political theologies

John Howard's State of Prisons portrays British prisons toward 1780 as places of injustice and arbitrariness, where conditions of detention were anything but humane. Continental prisons hardly appear better, except for some that Howard presents as models. After some years of easy life in the gentry, Howard devoted himself to his Grand Tour of European prisons. A philanthropist of his times, he analyzed prisons from a point of view that remains just as relevant today as it was 200 years ago.

In the early 1930s, Marc Bernard's social roots led him to join with, among others, Henri Poulaille, Eugène Dabit and Louis Guilloux to launch a club of proletarian authors and embrace political views not far removed from communism. Bernard's first novel was Zig-Zag, published by Gallimard in 1929. During that period, however, he befriended some surrealist poets who shunned the established order and whose inspiration was at times akin to his. Based on his articles published in Le Monde and Le Figaro and on unreported archives, this article seeks to illustrate Marc Bernard's complex literary aesthetics as they evolved from his first essays to his Goncourt win.

The lack of autonomy of Western European states, that is, the limitations which they confront in terms of translating their policy preferences into authoritative actions, cannot be considered solely in terms of idiosyncratic domestic political institutions and cultures, or as the result of greater sensibility and vulnerability to interdependence through the flow of goods, capital and technology. The argument develops around the generalisation that during the period of "détente" from 1965 to 1979, the United States, as the world central bank, inflated the world political economy ; thereafter, the questioning of détente accompanied a United States-led policy of world deflation. European politics, in a variety of intricate ways, followed the rythm set by the United States, with a period of state policy activism in the late 1960s to mid-1970s followed by more sceptical attitudes by public officials, supported by conservative or liberal parties, on the limitations of state action. But while it could be argued that the autonomy of OECD European states was strictly limited in economic policy by the integration of national into European and world markets, it is also demonstratable that the most sensitive of these markets - the world financial markets - are most susceptible to state policy, particularly that of the United States. In turn, the influence exerted on government preferences by world financial markets has grown to such an extent that by 1983, Western European governments are all aligning priorities on what are taken to be market criteria. If fact, they are aligning their priorities on the preferences of the great powers in a period of heightened international tension. Thus, the lack of autonomy of Western European states is of political origin: their subordination through lack of continued regional autonomy in defense and finance. Implicitly, this article suggests a move in Western Europe to a confederal armed force and a European Reserve Bank, as the precondition for a revitalised Atlantic alliance.

The paper presents a retrospective synthesis of the articulation of family models with ways of conceiving and transforming the geo-biophysical environment before and during the acceleration of industrialization in Western Europe. The aim is to demonstrate the sometimes unintuitive, but tangible, links between changes in society's relationship with nature and changes in kinship. The discussion is based primarily on a range of historical, anthropological and sociological publications deemed relevant to the exercise. Together, they offer an anthropo-historical perspective on the relationship between the environment and kinship, at a time when it is necessary to manage an environmental crisis. The paper concludes with a few suggestions for further research.

Keywords: Wauthier, famille, parenté, écologie, industrialisation, Europe occidentale, Wauthier, family, kinship, ecology, industrialization, Western Europe, Wauthier, familia, parentesco, ecología, industrialización, Europa occidental

The access of European regions to the international stage is not just a carry-over from the development of a new field of activities, nor simply a widening of their horizon of intervention and cooperation. Above all it is the outcome of a crucial evolution in the institutional architecture of powers at the heart of the European Union, an evolution which is itself linked to the transformation in modes of production and economic exchanges on a planetary scale : regions, more easily than centralized state powers, can take part in this changing scale of economic and political activity, and devise new forms of territorial governance and international relations. On the basis of political economic terms, it is suggested here that the same interpretive framework be applied to understanding the processes of globalization, continental integration and subnational regionalization.

Rhetorical devices can be used to meld phenomena as varied as terrorism, the drug traffic and immigration so that they appear to be manifestations of a single and widespread conspiracy. These devices may for example include listing a series of widely divergent occurrences and assembling in a single analysis facts, situations and phenomena that have no other link than their physical and lexical proximity within a text. The author uses several examples to illustrate the way this new analysis of threat is presented, which tends to generalize and exaggerate the danger of the phenomena under study.